blog: news from the world of protein crystallography

Ever wondered how you can fit just a few more hours into the day and gain that vital extra cup of coffee?

Now imagine if you could set up 96 drops in less than 2 minutes with the added bonus that 20x more time protein crstallograhpy experiments can be achieved using mosquito Crystal for automated drop setting (50 nL of protein per drop) compared to a manual set-up

Don’t just take our word for it; the new edition of labCrystal magazine describes how our mosquito and dragonfly liquid handlers have helped researchers to gain more from their crystallisation experiments and, significantly shorten the time taken to get the structure they need.

The studies presented in labCrystal describe how successful TTP Labtech’s mosquito and dragonfly have been in making it possible to screen and optmise more conditions in a shorter space of time:

Dr Chris Ulens, Katholieke Universiteit, Belgium, in collaboration with Janssen Pharma describes an innovative fragment screening method that identifies potential allosteric drug binding sites of a receptor involved in ion channel diseases. Thanks to the mosquito’s low pipetting volumes, an average of 1,000 conditions could be screened per complex leading to high-throughput identification of crystallisation conditions within 1-2 weeks

Dr. Steven Johnson and Dr. Matt Cottee, Oxford University, UK have used X-ray crystallography to analyse a protein involved in centriole assembly (Ana2). mosquito Crystal and dragonfly enabled multiple screening conditions to be tested and optimised which resulted in the determination of a high resolution structure

Dr Larissa Podust, University of California, San Diego, USA and Dr Hugues Ouellet, University of Texas, USA describe the structural determination of a transcription repressor, KstR co-crystallised with a cholesterol inducer or the KstR DNA operator. KstR regulates cholesterol catabolism and virulence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Both mosquito and dragonfly were essential for low-volume crystallisation and optimisation when concentrations of each component in the mix varied in small increments

Dr David Hargreaves, AstraZeneca, UK describes a novel low-volume, high-throughput soaking method developed for screening a fragment-based lead generation library. The success of this soaking method relied on the accuracy and reproducibility of mosquito Crystal’s low-volume pipetting.

And finally, labCrystal describes how mosquito LCP has been integral to GPCR membrane protein crystallisation. Many of these studies have produced multiple Nature papers and this article highlights Heptares Therapeutics’ work in this field.

If you are interested in learning more about any of these studies, then why not download a copy of labCrystal from our website today.

Do you have an interesting story that you would like to present to the Crystallography community, then we’d love to hear form you and hopefully see your work in a future edition!